22% of U.S. Adults Have Tried Crypto, but Retention Lags

By Nathan Brooks

A national Ipsos survey found that 22% of U.S. adults have owned or used cryptocurrency, up from 18% in 2025, while past-year use remained at 13%. The four-percentage-point gain widened trial without increasing recent participation: roughly one in five adults have tried crypto, but only about one in eight used it during the past year.

Ipsos polled 1,545 adults from Sept. 8 to 16 on its KnowledgePanel, the probability-based panel the Federal Reserve uses for its annual survey of household finances. The DeFi Education Fund, a cryptocurrency policy advocacy group, commissioned the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.

Has crypto converted trial into regular use?

Not materially. Among Americans who had not used crypto in the past year, 11% had tried it, more than double the 5% recorded a year earlier. The survey said almost all of the overall increase came from these lapsed users.

Future purchase intentions barely moved: 17% said they were likely to own or use crypto, compared with 16% last year. For businesses, the result is broader top-of-funnel trial without a corresponding increase in stated future intent.

Men were more than twice as likely as women to have used crypto in the past year, 18% versus 8%. Adults under 60 also used crypto at higher rates than older Americans.

Curiosity remained the leading reason for trying crypto, cited by 34% of people who had owned it. Long-term investment followed at 25%. The split places curiosity ahead of investment as the stated entry point, even as recent use remains flat.

How much confidence do Americans have?

The survey found broad unease with the traditional financial system:

• 19% say the financial system is secure.
• 63% say it needs an upgrade to address cybercrime and artificial intelligence.
• 60% worry about data breaches at major financial institutions.
• 54% doubt those institutions can protect personal information from AI-driven threats.
• 74% say financial privacy matters.

That skepticism did not transfer to crypto:

• 4% report high trust in crypto exchanges.
• 5% report high trust in decentralized platforms.
• 42% report high trust in large national banks.
• 48% report high trust in credit unions, down five percentage points from last year.

Low institutional trust does not, on its own, translate into demand for crypto-based alternatives.

In separate security developments, hardware-wallet maker Ledger said: “All confirmed cases in a suspected $87 million drain involved hardware wallets sold by a Southeast Asian reseller.” For security teams, the operational distinction is provenance: the statement ties every confirmed case to devices bought through one regional reseller channel.

Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, warned: “Advances in AI could break the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum sooner than expected.” His warning adds a long-horizon security concern to respondents’ immediate worries about cyberattacks and AI-driven threats.

What does this change for crypto businesses?

The clearest operational shift is a wider pool of people who have sampled crypto but do not use it now. Exchanges, wallets and DeFi applications cannot treat headline trial growth as evidence of active demand; past-year use and future purchase plans offer the more useful measures of retention.

DeFi also faces an education bottleneck. Only 2% of respondents say they are very familiar with decentralized finance, which lets users buy, sell or borrow digital assets without third-party intermediaries. Just 6% identified all four crypto characteristics in the survey, and 35% could not describe crypto at all.

Yet 40% would be at least somewhat likely to try DeFi if it were available. More than eight in ten in that group would use it to save money, earn interest or send money to family and friends, putting basic financial utility at the center of prospective demand.

Interest in learning more has receded. The share wanting to learn about stablecoins fell to 7% from 11%, and the share wanting to learn about DeFi fell to 8% from 11%. Those declines came even after the GENIUS Act set federal rules for stablecoins.

For industry operators, the immediate task is to turn expressed curiosity into repeat use while addressing low trust in exchanges and decentralized platforms.

The next market-structure checkpoint is whether the GENIUS Act’s federal stablecoin rules reverse falling learning interest and translate stated interest into sustained participation beyond the current 13%.